Maitreya: the stories first, then the spelling
The marks in Maitreya make the most sense standing next to the myths they have to carry. So the myths come first.
The Stories That Carry the Name
Metteyya at the End of the Decline. The oldest prophecy of the future Buddha stands in the Cakkavattisihanāda Sutta (DN 26): after the wheel-turning king Daḷhanemi, greed returns, human life shrinks to ten years — and then, slowly, morality climbs back until people live eighty thousand years. In that age a Buddha named Metteyya will arise, fully awakened, attended by thousands, holding three great assemblies beneath a pavilion — and the wheel will turn a fourth time in this eon. Later Pāli texts place him now in Tuṣita heaven, where Śākyamuni himself waited before his final birth.
The Descent at Ketumatī. The Sanskrit tradition gives the future a city and a plot. The Maitreyavyākaraṇa — transmitted within the Divyāvadāna and translated repeatedly into Chinese and Tibetan — describes Maitreya's birth in splendid Ketumatī, when the wheel-turning king Saṅkha rules, lifespans run to eighty thousand years, and the Dharma has been forgotten. Born to the brahmin Subrahma, he will leave his palace by the four gates, meet an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a renunciant — the very sights that unseated Śākyamuni — and awaken beneath a nāga-puṣpikā tree in a single night.
The Earliest Future on Earth. Maitreya is among the very first bodhisattvas to receive cult — earlier than most of the Mahāyāna pantheon. Gandhāran art of the Kuṣāṇa centuries (2nd–3rd c. CE) already shows him in the dress of a princely ascetic: stūpa in the crown, water flask in hand, sometimes teaching with a wheel at his feet.
And Here Is What the Spelling Preserves
At a Glance
- Restored name: Maitreya
- ASCII form: maitreya
- Meaning: "'The Benevolent One' — the Bodhisattva who will return as the future Buddha"
- Domain of influence: Future Buddha, Loving-Kindness
- Pantheon: Buddhist
- Classification: Tier 2
- Original script: मैत्रेय
- Series: The Restoration Files, No. 291 of 548
The Name Travels
Maitreya's reception is the strangest career of any bodhisattva. In India he absorbed the iconography of a future world-ruler — crowned, princely, seated European-style with pendant legs, a god of the age to come.
The Address It Earned
The temple of Maitreya stands at /maitreya/ — lore, scholars, patterns — because a name carrying this much story deserves more than a parking page. The restoration keeps one feature the ASCII form drops. One is enough to matter, and the label says so plainly: Tier-2.
The Sources Are Open
The myths above are retold from the temple's record; the primary voices are in the Sacred Texts: Lotus Sutra and Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtras. Nothing in this file outranks them.
The File Continues
Read the founding dispatch for the name's full story, the Resonance File for the archetype at work — or the whole archive in one sitting.
Continue the series — previous file: Mago (read it here) · next file: Makemake (read it here).
The Restoration Files are written from the same canonical record as the temples themselves: the lexicon, the lore catalog, the pattern atlas, and the cited scholarly sources. If a file ever disagrees with its temple, the temple is right — tell us, and the file will be corrected.